Cigar-chomping Darryl Zanuck re-created one of history's most momentous events on the beaches of Normandy.

It is something of a miracle that the Allies
succeeded on that cold, fog-shrouded morning of June 6, 1944, in
Normandy, France. On that significant date General Eisenhower's huge
invasion armada began the famous onslaught that would lead to the end
of the Second World War.

It was easily the largest, most daring, meticulously planned military
assault ever undertaken, yet it was also plagued by the most
astonishing incidents and accidents, the kinds of human errors and
communications failures that could easily have turned the effort into
disaster--and in some instances did.

In 1961, Darryl F. Zanuck, producer and former czar of Twentieth
Century Fox Studios, began to roll the cameras for The Longest
Day, his painstaking reenactment in black and white of Operation
Overlord, the code name for the invasion. Zanuck's is easily the most
ambitious war film ever made. (Recently colorized, The Longest
Day has been re-released on FoxVideo to commemorate the fiftieth
anniversary of D-Day.)

Zanuck used Cornelius "Connie" Ryan's book, The Longest Day, as
the basis for his epic masterpiece. Ryan wrote the first script and
eventually became a technical adviser to the film, which took
virtually a year to create. Some of the historical mishaps that Ryan
recounted seemed almost too unbelievable to be true, yet provided some
of the most memorable moments in the film. The movie was divided into
four segments: American, British, French and German--each with its own
director and the cooperation of the respective government.

Zanuck, his cigar always firmly clamped between his teeth, was the
"supreme commander" involved in just about every detail of the huge
cinematic undertaking--right down to the timing of explosions on the
sound track. One instance of his obsessive attention to detail was his
search for two, old Messerschmitts, the only German planes that
actually attacked the invasion force. He found them in Belgium, but he
had to build some of the Horsa gliders that carried the advance Allied
paratroopers behind the German front lines a few minutes after
midnight on June 6.

I was director of publicity for the film and spent most of the year
working very closely with Zanuck and his top assistants. He was not an
easy boss--demanding, a stickler for detail and not known for a sense
of humor. A former lieutenant colonel in the Signal Corps, he had two
great loves: danger--any kind of danger--and cigars. To see Zanuck
without his fat, long cigar was unthinkable. He smoked it, he chewed
it, he used it like a swagger stick; he would sometimes poke you with
it for emphasis. But although he had an almost bottomless supply of
cigars, he never shared them with anyone, not even his closest aides.

Robert Mitchum, one of the 42 big-name stars in the movie, told me one
evening in Caen that when Zanuck was head of the studio he often held
meetings in his office. George Jessel, an avid cigar smoker, attended
once, but had forgotten to bring his own cigar along and lusted for
one that winked at him from Zanuck's open humidor.

When Zanuck turned his back, Jessel reached for the cigar. At that
moment, Zanuck turned around and whacked him across the knuckles with
a metal ruler. The injury that resulted was serious enough to send
Jessel to the studio nurse, yet Zanuck thought he had been perfectly
justified. In any case, he never apologized.

Zanuck also kept a supply of Havana cigars in a vault at Davidoff's
famous store in Geneva. Whenever he ran low, I'd be asked to fly to
Geneva on some pretext to pick up more boxes.

The title, The Longest Day, oddly, came from German General
Rommel. Discussing the expected Allied landings on the French coast,
he told an aide that if the Germans couldn't stop the Allied forces in
their landing craft, despite the thousands of mines and the deadly
underwater obstacles designed by the Desert Fox himself, that day
would effectively end the war. "That will be the longest day," Rommel
predicted. And it turned out to be--for both sides. It turned out that
the day was longer for the Nazis because they ignored critical clues
that could well have prepared them for D-Day.

Zanuck originally didn't plan for any female roles. Then he met Irina
Demich (who became his lover) and wrote a role for her as French
Resistance fighter Janine Gilles, who was responsible for saving many
Allied fliers. The movie starred masculine icons like Mitchum, John
Wayne, Henry Fonda, Rod Steiger, Robert Wagner, Sean Connery, Richard
Burton and many others. To re-create the assault, the director used
the actual invasion beaches--Utah, Omaha, Sword, Juno, Gold.

Zanuck used flamethrowers to clear the thick brush growth from the old
German defenses. His troops--played by actual U.S. Marines--fired
grapple-hooks to the top of 100-foot Pointe du Hoc, climbed up the
slippery ropes and tossed grenades at the bunkers, just as their
real-life comrades had done 17 years before. Zanuck erected a huge
crane on the invasion site and installed his camera on a platform that
could be raised and lowered up and down the side of the cliff. He
frequently directed action sequences himself, always recognizable from
his big cigar and small stature and always very much in charge.

During the D-Day invasion the United States Rangers lost 81 of their
225 men in the assault on Pointe du Hoc. Men died falling from ropes
and ladders to the pebbly beach below. When they reached the bunkers,
they found that the big German guns that were supposed to be there had
never been installed--a fact that Allied headquarters hadn't
discovered. (Five 155-millimeter cannons were found and destroyed in
an apple orchard not far from the bunkers.)

Sainte-Mère-Église was the little Normandy village where
American paratroopers landed in droves on roofs, in trees and
hedgerows in the middle of the night. Pvt. John Steele, wounded in the
leg and hanging by his parachute on the
Sainte-Mère-Église church steeple, was forced to play
dead while a fierce battle raged below. Steele was played by Red
Buttons in the movie. Zanuck prevented a riot when the hundreds of
onlookers who had come to watch the filming of the battle for
Sainte-Mère-Église suddenly saw "German soldiers"
(actually French extras in German uniforms) march into the main
square. Stones suddenly flew and insults were shouted until Zanuck
reminded the excited crowd that it was just a moviemaking--real as it
might seem.

At a bridge over the Caen Canal, Zanuck's big, black gliders lay with
their noses crunched into the ground, some broken and destroyed just
as on that fateful night. Peter Lawford played Lord Lovat, the casual
British Ranger commander, who led his squad across the bridge under
heavy German fire, jauntily swinging his swagger stick as a bagpipe
squealed.

At Ouistreham, where the French capture of German headquarters
was reenacted in a large casino, Zanuck shared gambling memories
with Cmdr. Philippe Kieffer, who had led the 171 French commandos on
the original raid.

Zanuck didn't spare himself during those months of filming. I often
went with him when he flew by helicopter from one of the movie's four
locations to another. The trouble was that our "supreme commander,"
furiously chewing on his ever-present cigar, would urge the pilot to
fly ever lower over those endless hedgerows. Zanuck enjoyed chasing
rabbits that way, but the pilot argued that even an additional few
inches represented a real danger. Meanwhile, I died a little on each
flight.

At times, we would fly over the limitless expanse of white crosses
that mark the graves of the 9,350 American soldiers who died in the
invasion. There were 2,500 British casualties and 200 Canadians. Some
6,000 German defenders are buried in a separate cemetery where black
crosses loom over their graves.

At one point, Zanuck needed an actor to play an Allied pilot who had
been shot down and had landed in a field. Many names were
suggested. Suddenly Zanuck stabbed his cigar in the direction of his
main assistant, Elmo Williams, and said excitedly: "I've got it. Get
me Richard Burton on the phone in Rome." Burton at that time was
starring opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. "They'll never
let him go," argued Williams. "You just watch me," Zanuck assured him
with a grin.

A few days later, Burton arrived for one day's work. He looked dashing
in his flier's uniform, complete with a large, elegant white
scarf. Burton had agreed to work for nothing--provided Zanuck would
let him keep the scarf, which he intended as a present for his
Elizabeth.

One of the most vexing casting problems in The Longest Day was
the role of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Zanuck respected screenplay
writer Connie Ryan, but didn't like him very much. One day, he
instructed us to enthusiastically greet an announcement he was to make
at the weekly staff meeting. The day came, and Zanuck, puffing
contentedly on his cigar, said: "Gentlemen, I have decided who will
play Ike. The actor I have chosen is Mickey Rooney." Applause all
'round. Ryan, a stickler for details--he was forever arguing with
Zanuck about uniform buttons and who was marching where and in what
direction--sat in shock.

"What's the matter, Connie? You aren't agreeing with me again?" Zanuck
grinned. And then Ryan knew that his leg had been pulled.

The actor who played Eisenhower was Henry Grace, a set de-signer at
MGM Studios, who bore a truly uncanny likeness to the supreme
commander and who, just walking the studio streets, was frequently
mistaken for him.

Filming the great invasion with the kind of realism demanded by Zanuck
required all kinds of sacrifices. During the real thing, seasick GIs
poured out of landing craft that frequently had been blown off course,
so that they came to shore in deep water. The soldiers attempted to
wade ashore, but hundreds never made it, drowning under the weight of
their heavy packs.

I recall standing on Sword Beach, one of the British landing
areas. Next to me, clearly in pain, stood a tall Tommy decked out in
full gear. He explained that he had turned his ankle coming off one of
the boats during the last shot and he was worried about the next take.

"I've got to be in it," he said, his voice betraying his Scottish
background. "I've just got to be!"

"You'll be OK," I assured him. "What's your name?"

"Sean Connery," he replied and limped off.

THE DIRTY DETAILS

Part of the thrill of The Longest Day was re-creating the sense
of drama and tension that surrounded the lead-up to the real
invasion. In retrospect, both sides seemed almost determined to foul
up the preparations.

The Allies went to great lengths to keep the actual incursion date a
secret, hoping to fool the Germans into believing that the air- and
seaborne assault would take place across the Strait of Dover in the
Pas-de-Calais area rather than right across the Channel. Even down to
the last day, when Eisenhower ordered the invasion fleet to return to
port rather than face a raging storm--the worst to hit the Channel in
some 20 years--there was fear that the Germans had spotted the ships
and were prepared for the landings. They hadn't.

And Adolf Hitler, even after the Allies had landed, still believed the
Normandy beach fighting was only a cover for the "real thing" to come.

Even more astonishing, the German Wehrmacht high command had plenty of
warning. A German spy at the British Embassy in Turkey had told his
superiors in Berlin that the BBC in London would alert the French
Resistance to the invasion by broadcasting a two-part coded message
taken from a poem by Paul Verlaine called "Song of Autumn."

The first part would be: "The long sobs of the violins of autumn." The
second, signaling an attack within 48 hours, was: "Wound my heart with
a monotonous languor." The poem was duly broadcast and set off a wide
range of railroad demolition and other destructive activities by the
French underground.